Space, the final marketing frontier

Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen05.20.2014

FOR USE AS DESIRED, YEAR END PHOTOS - FILE - In this Oct. 14, 2012 file photo provided by Red Bull Stratos, pilot Felix Baumgartner of Austria jumps out of the capsule during the final manned flight for Red Bull Stratos. In a giant leap from more than 24 miles up, Baumgartner shattered the sound barrier while making the highest jump ever with a tumbling, death-defying plunge from a balloon to a safe landing in the New Mexico desert.Uncredited
/ Ottawa Citizen

The gold-plated golf club has already been used for practice inside the station ? here, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev tackles a tricky lie in 2005 (Image: Element 21 Golf Company) Space Station
/ Ottawa Citizen

UNDATED -- The Canadarm and Canadarm 2 appear to cradle the Hubble Space Telescope as an astronaut is anchored to the end of one of the arms during a repair mission to the telescope in May 2009. The Shuttle Atlantis is seen in the foreground. HANDOUT PHOTO: NASA For Max Harrold (Postmedia News). SHUTTLE-GREATEST
/ Ottawa Citizen

So, a Japanese corporation will put a soft drink on the moon. Is this a final frontier in crassly commercial space exploitation?

Well, actually, it’s not new. Companies have used space for marketing stunts long before the oddly named Pocari Sweat (yes, it’s a drink). Here’s a look:

• The latest attempt is from Japanese beverage maker Otsuka. It wants to send a can of its powdered sports drink, Pocari Sweat, to the moon aboard a Space X rocket in 2015. Otsuka hopes someone will later show up and drink the stuff.

• Coke and Pepsi both launched soft-drink dispensers on shuttles starting in 1985, trying to get around the fact that fizzy drinks don’t work in zero gravity. (Bubbles can’t rise when there’s no “up,” and a drink under pressure could spray everywhere, gumming up the computers.)

They built fancy contraptions of pressurised cans (some like shaving cream cans) and coolers, eventually sending up Coke, Pepsi, Diet Coke and Powerade through the 1990s. Results were so-so and both companies lost interest.

• Canadian golf company Element 21 paid to have a spacewalking cosmonaut take a six-iron shot in 2006, advertising its new scandium clubs. THAT got space geeks upset.

It wasn’t the commercialism that bothered them. It was the serious issue of space junk — orbiting debris that can destroy a satellite. All kinds of planning went into the shot to send it safely down to Earth.

Mikhail Tyurin shanked it anyway.

• Speaking of Canada, the Canadarms are a brilliant case of marketing. They carry the federal government’s brand: The word Canada with the little flag, which shows up in a lot of space photos.

• NASA and Disney co-launched Buzz Lightyear action figures aboard the International Space Station in 2008. NASA claimed the videos were educational. Oh.

* Space tourism is alive and well. You can pay tens of millions to travel up and back on the Soyuz. In fact, that’s the only way Canadian and U.S. astronauts can travel to the space station. The Russians charge us $70 million per ride.

Some companies will launch your ashes into space. That’s where Canadian actor James Doohan went. (He was Scotty on Star Trek.)

• NASA, which is very focused on raising money, once considered corporate sponsorships for the shuttles. A cartoon in one Florida newspaper showed a shuttle covered with the logo of the International House of Pancakes, a popular eatery.

Apollo astronaut Alan Shepard took the first two golf shots on the moon, but he wasn’t paid to do it.

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